Robert Gates, Neo-Isolationist?

“(A)ny future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. MacArthur so delicately put it,” Robert Gates has just told the cadets at West Point.

America would be nuts, Gates is saying, to fight a new land war like the two he inherited.

It follows that the “neo-isolationists” who opposed invading Iraq and a “long war” in Afghanistan were right, in Gates’ eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.

Yet, do not the balance sheets of both wars bear Gates out?

Nearly 10 years after 9/11, at a cost of $100 billion a year, we are still bleeding in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, however, is long gone, but embedded today in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

Eight years after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the butcher’s bill is in: 4,400 U.S. dead, 37,000 wounded, 100,000 Iraqi dead, half a million widows and orphans, half of Iraq’s Christian population in exile, the other half terrorized and a Shia Iraq drifting toward Tehran.

For what? Al-Qaida was not in Iraq in 2003, but it is there now.

Pushed by neoconservatives to institute a no-fly zone over Libya, Gates retorted: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya.” To sustain it would require at least two aircraft carriers. Why is Libya’s civil war our problem?

Gates is now singing in tune with his country.

Yet his position implies a new foreign policy.

For if we are not going to fight another land war in Asia, what are we doing with 28,000 troops in Korea, many up on the DMZ, as Pyongyang rants about hurling a “sea of fire” against the South?

Why not withdraw the U.S. troops, let South Koreans take their place and sell Seoul the weapons to defend itself, while restricting our role, should the North attack, to air and naval support?

Why should U.S. troops fight a second Korean War, 60 years after the first and 20 years after the end of the Cold War? Was not the first Korean War the war that soured MacArthur on any future land war in Asia?

What vital interest of ours is at risk on that Asian peninsula?

The Nixon Doctrine of 1969 declared that, post-Vietnam, should any U.S. Asian ally be attacked, “we shall furnish military and economic assistance … in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.”

Is this doctrine not relevant to today and consistent with what Gates is saying? If we are not going to fight any new land war in Asia, bring the Marines home from Okinawa, where they have been based for 65 years. Let Japan take responsibility for the island’s defense.

Yet, even as Gates was speaking, Pentagon officials were talking of using Marines to evict Chinese troops, should they occupy disputed islands in the South and East China seas.

Among the claimants to the islands in the South China Sea are Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei. The co-claimant to the Senkakus in the East China Sea is Japan.

Why should holding or recapturing these islands, none of which is ours and almost all of which are uninhabited, be the Marine Corps’ job?

If we are not going to fight another land war in Asia, when the troops come home from Afghanistan and Iraq, let us close the U.S. bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As the Russia-Georgia clash showed, America is not going to fight in the Caucasus, either.

As for Europe, the Red Army went home decades ago. Eastern Europe and the Baltic republics are free. As President Eisenhower urged JFK 50 year ago, we should bring U.S. troops home and let Europe man up to its own defense.

No one threatens Europe today, and we could sell them all the missiles, tanks, ships, guns and planes they need to defend themselves.

Robert Kagan writes in The Weekly Standard that before we cut defense we must decide what commitments we are going to give up.

He is correct. Instead of cutting the sinew, bone and muscle of defense, let us first terminate treaty commitments to go to war for nations that have nothing to do with U.S. vital national interests.

U.S. policy should be to tell Europe, Asia, Africa and the Mideast: Your defense is first and foremost your responsibility. You police your own neighborhood. And if there is something you can’t handle, give us a call. We may be able to help. Then again, we may not.

Pat, I believe it was MacArthur who warned more than 50 years ago that the U.S. should not wage another land war on the Asian continent. MacArthur graduated first in his class at West Point and was a brilliant general in the field. Senator John McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy (and probably wouldn’t have been admitted but for his grandfather and father being admirals), lost five planes before being shot down over North Vietnam, admittedly gave information to his North Vietnamese captives for which any other military man would have been court martialed, and was awarded a Silver Star merely for serving 5-1/2 years as a POW, and he thinks we should stay in Afghanistan and should not rule out another land war in Asia.

President Eisenhower, who as General served as Supreme Commander of one of the largest armies in history, believed that we should pull all of our troops out of Europe. Senator McCain (see above) believes we should expand NATO to include Georgia (the birthplace of Joseph Stalin).

The late Senator Richard Russell (D. Ga.), a segrationist but a devoted patriot and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (as it was then known) back in the late 50’s through 60’s, thought in 1966 that the only worst place to fight a war in Asia than Vietnam was Afghanistan. A letter to the NY Times a year and a half ago stated:
“To the Editor:

I want to offer the secretaries of state and defense a warning that I came across in the papers of the late Senator Richard B. Russell, a Democrat from Georgia.

After Senator Russell’s onetime protégé, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had moved the United States into a major war in Vietnam, something Senator Russell had warned against, he lamented in 1966 to a constituent in Georgia that opponents of the United States had ”outwitted us in getting us pinned down in the most unfavorable place in Asia to fight a war, unless it be Afghanistan.”

I found this letter in 1989, 14 years after the United States pulled out ignominiously from Vietnam, and just as the Soviet Union had withdrawn from its long, drawn-out venture in Afghanistan. David M. Barrett

Villanova, Pa., Oct. 13, 2009″

Senator McCain (see above) still thinks we should continue fighting in Afghanistan.

When the brightest bulbs in the class believe one thing and the dimmest bulb believes another, who am I supposed to believe, Pat?

We certainly need strong relationships with certain allies, principally Germany and Japan, but they can (and better) start gearing up to “defend their own neighborhoods”, as Pat puts it, and contribute their share to mutual security. Uncle Sugar blew his inheritance during the insane spending sprees and strategic blunders of the last three presidencies and will have to move into the caretaker’s house for a few decades.

I can’t think of a more opportune time for America to dispense with the bogus “Middle East peace process” and let the Turks, Israelis, Egyptians and Syrians make their own arrangements.

Certainly it’s interesting that Gates said this. What seems to me more important however is its … unimportance. Perhaps mirroring our domestic situation, but clearly even worse, our foreign policies have just become unhinged from reality, being driven by forces that don’t care about our national interest but instead only by their special interests. Lobbyists caring only about the interests of those who pay them or the objects of their own zeal, politicians caring only about getting re-elected, governmental bureaucracies caring only about themselves, and etc. and so forth.

Thus, no matter how obvious something may be, and no matter who says it, it’s just not important.

Remind me of what George Orwell said that “political thought [] is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters.”

Indeed it can sure seem that in at least many of our foreign policies the world of fact doesn’t matter at all anymore.

I would also prohibit the sale of military equipment to any non-US entity by companies doing business in the US, whether American owned or not. These companies use various means to enflame tensions; offering to sell war goods to country A, then telling country B that A is arming itself, and that B needs the war goods offered by A to keep pace with A.
One counter-argument is that these companies pay well, and I have worked for several of them over the years, but it is time to face the fact that the war profiteers(defense contractors) are among the most corrupt businesses in the world. Do we want to be supporting this level of corruption?
Another counter-argument is that if American companies don’t sell the goods, someone else will. But if legislation is enacted and enforced, prohibiting the sale of armaments by any company doing business in the US, then these companies will have a choice: Sell war goods around the world, or sell their other, more profitable goods in the US. I think that most of these companies will decide to keep their American markets.

So in the Iraq war retrospective, the Bushcons/neocons “should have their heads examined,” and the “isolationists” were the only ones with a modicum of sanity

The Iraq war never was about the general American interest, but rather about war-profiteering, maintaining the Keynesian military-industrial complex “national security” welfare scam/wealth transfer, taking out one of Israel’s enemies, and neocon/neolib “creative destruction” Globalism.

“Isolationist” always was an epithet thrown out by elite elements who profited from the scam, and the general Keynesian swindle, to suppress dissent.

That they were able to get away with it all so easily just goes to show the extent to which the mainstream mass media is in their pocket.

America is no longer being governed to serve the general interest, but rather to serve multiple particularistic special interests, and our elites and Ruling Class in no way represent the common interest.

In this sense, we can barely even define ourselves as a country anymore, but rather a mere assortment of conspiring grifters and confidence men, and their victims.

100% right Pat. End the wars, pull out of the alliances, close the bases and bring the troops home. In the last Presidential election only Ron Paul shared this foreign policy and thats why I voted for Ron Paul. He may not share our view on tariffs to bring back manufacturers and he almost certainly doesn,t take my pro union line on Wisconsin but in regards to foreign policy and ending NAFTA, pulling out of the WTO and his stance against the Patriot Act he has my full support.

Happy to say I’ve been saying this since before ’91. As has Mr. Buchanan himself. Why did we need a new bogeyman after the fall of the wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union? It doesn’take a genius to connecthe dots.

I don’t know Polichinello, he had what, 75 + successful amphibious landings? Mostly due to superior Intel and logistics. In Korea his plans were in the hands of the Commies. Gotta forgive him for letting power go to his head, and wanting to nuke the Chinese. If you’re going to fight a war, it’s not like boxing, was his point, and he was getting old, crotchety, ornery and cantankerous at his age in a world without depends.

We can never speak the truth about our situation – can we! The word “neocon” is used but never the truthful word “Zionism.” Zionism dictates our US foreign policy – we all know this to be true. This is a problem for the whole world.

Jesus said “the truth will set you free” – well ignoring the truth will never see us free.

Only speaking the truth about Zionism will set Gentile and Jew alike free from this warmongering monster.

We wont have a real conservative foreign policy until we boot the neo-cons out and wean American Republicans off the notion that their personal ego is tied to how many American aircraft carriers we have on the world’s oceans at any one time.

I have had too many faux conservatives start screaming and calling me a liberal because I have proposed the radical notion that the U.S. military should actually defend the U.S., not the rest of the world.

Still, it’s nice to see the current Secretary of Defense starting to agree with me.

The biggest problem with Mr. Buchanan’s article or thought-process is that, once the United States stops fighting for other nations’ interests, the “other nations” will abandon the U.S. dollars as world’s reserve currency.

And, once the U.S.A. loses its greenbacks’ reserve currency status, American government will not be able to import more goods than it can export.

That will be a very dangerous scenario!

People at the upper echelon of the U.S. government opine that, in a loss of reserve currency status of the U.S. dollars, American government will be forced to balance Federal budgets in the short run, which will force the U.S. government to stop immigration of people from third world countries as the U.S. government will have to live within its means and will be unable to sustain the current welfare state of America, and the government officials will not able to draw their annual six or seven-figure-salaries.

So, not fighting other nations’ wars may have a “negative” impact on the current state of America.

Americans are accustomed to buy more than they can afford.

Americans are accustomed to spend more than their existing balances of bank accounts.

Americans are accustomed to buy a bigger house than what they actually need or can pay for.

If a sandwich costs only five bucks, Americans will say, “That’s non-sense! Here is ten.”

It all sounds wonderful, but once the US troops get out of Asia and Europe, these countries will fend for themselves not by buying arms and war technologies from the US, but building their own. And Europe has quite a powerful military industry even now and is able not only to supply itself, but because of having to invest more in the defense, will push more aggressively to sell weapons abroad, to minimize the costs.

And then the US paranoia will hit high gear, that the Japanese and the Germans and the Chinese are getting stronger and stronger and trying to take over America and make it dissapear from the map, like Poland did several times…